I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.

Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.

PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive.

Who needs toothpaste when you have cigarettes?

He supposes in this way he's learned to pray not as one might to the gods but as one does by simply pausing every now and then to think of others.

Flashlights would have been nice. Next adventure, Coralee was going to bring a flashlight.

In the clutch of circumstance I have not winced or cried aloud Under the bludgeoning of chance my head is bloody but unbowed.

I'm trying to get across the message that don't be afraid of animals, they're just put on this earth to help the environment and everything like that.

I laugh at my heart, and do its will

Love has more force than a besieging army.

Whether your time calls you to live or die, do both like a prince.

We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.

He who always thinks himself as weak will never become strong, but he who knows himself to be a lion, rushes out from the worlds meshes, as a lion from its cage.